JULY 17, 2013
A barrage of bad news shows Obamacare is a 'monstrosity' that misses its goal and will add megabucks to our national debt
'The nickname, Obamacare, should be spelled Obamascare'
BOHEMIA, New York – "The people who wrote the Affordable Care Act apparently didn't know what was in it either. They touted it as the cure for what ails you. But three years later they have to admit that Obamacare, at best, was a mistake. At worst, it was pure and simple malfeasance."
That's how Dan Weber, president of the Association of Mature American Citizens, characterized the revelations about the law that are emerging this summer.
He said the administration's "sheepish" admission last week that the law's employer mandate would have to be delayed for one more year due to its complexities was an indication of Obamacare's more profound defects. It also lends support to those in Washington who say the law should be scrapped. Speaker of the House John Boehner, for one, said: "This is a clear acknowledgment that the law is unworkable, and it underscores the need to repeal the law and replace it with effective, patient-centered reforms."
Many expect a delay will soon follow in the individual mandate, which requires everyone to buy insurance or pay a fine. In fact, there are some that say when the government delayed the employer mandate, it implicitly delayed the individual mandate as well. If the system is unable to collect and manage required information to enforce the employer mandate, it is therefore also unable to do so for individuals, they argue.
"Perhaps Nancy Pelosi was wrong and lawmakers should have read the bill before enacting it into law, a 2,000 page monstrosity that has spawned more than 20,000 additional pages of regulations," Weber said.
A variety of additional hurdles need to be overcome before the Affordable Care Act can be implemented properly. For example, more than half of the states have chosen not to establish insurance exchanges and so the federal government will need to step in, significantly adding to the cost of the law, he explained.
"It started when one of Obamacare's principal authors, Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont, described the ACA as 'a train wreck in the making.' Subsequently, Kathleen Sebelius, Health and Human Services Secretary, meekly admitted that health insurance premiums would, indeed, go up-not down, as she and other administration surrogates were originally touting. Then came the latest barrage of bad news about the how the law is just too unwieldy to implement," he said.
The Cato Institute, one of the nation's most respected "think tanks," has pointed out that Obamacare had as its principal goal health care insurance coverage for the nation's 30 million uninsured. But here is what their researchers have found, noted Weber:
"The Congressional Budget Office now estimates that by 2023, there will still be more than 30 million uninsured Americans. Moreover, roughly 40 percent of those that Obamacare does cover don't really receive health insurance but are simply dumped into Medicaid, hardly known for high-quality care. In fact, according to the CBO, by the end of the decade almost 11 million fewer Americans will have private unsubsidized health insurance than do today."
Meanwhile, Weber pointed out, the Government Accounting Office figures the law will add $1.4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.
"The Affordable Care Act should be renamed the Unaffordable Care Act and the nickname, Obamacare, should be spelled Obamascare. It was a politically motivated piece of legislation in the first place and like all such bad laws it needs to be repealed," he concluded.
